I have a FreeBSD machine that I want to also run Windows 2008 on. The machine is currently a file server, which is a role it will need to keep. All of the disks are formatted as BSD FFS and can't be reformatted. There are two approaches I have in mind, but I'm not sure if either is possible.

1) Install Citrix or similar on the machine on one of the disks, and use FreeBSD and Windows as guest OSes. The FreeBSD OS would need to access all of the other disks directly (which is presumably not possible).

2) Install Windows 2008 under FreeBSD using VirtualBox or similar. Problem is, the FreeBSD machine is headless, and I'd need to be able to admin the Windows server console remotely. It appears that the free version of VirtualBox doesn't support this.

2 Answers
2

1) A lot of the hypervisors do support RAW access to disks, so you should be able to convert your existing server into a VM session/instance (plus you may be able to convert the data disks into virtualized disks too as another option).

2) Although the free version of VirtualBox does not included RDP access, you can still enable that or anything similar from within Windows itself.

I find it worth noting the the "free" Open Source Edition (OSE) of VirtualBox does support VNC connections to the guest in place of RDP connections.
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GoyuixAug 8 '10 at 21:58

Wow! That's not mentioned/referred to even on their (SUN/Oracle) own web site...
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user48838Aug 8 '10 at 22:04

+1 to answer and to Goyuix; You can use the non-free version as well for personal or in certain circumstances in business. Check out their page to see if your use case qualifies. But as is already pointed out, you can just RDP directly to the Windows VM
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gWaldoSep 10 '10 at 12:50

QEmu will run on FreeBSD and will run Windows 2008, though it runs through processor emulation, so it's a bit pokey. They're working on kqemu for Windows 2008, but last I checked it wasn't working correctly yet and you end up with BSOD.

If you could add another disk you could use Hyper-V server or ESXi and keep the existing disks in tact. Almost all virtualization technologies will allow you to pass disks through to the guest OS.